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I remember where I was . . . I remember who I was with . . .

(this entry has been shared, or posted on Escape from Averageness®, every year on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks)

On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, sixteen years ago to the minute, I was in the offices of Fidelity Homes, in Venice, Florida, commencing a process mapping engagement to give this start-up homebuilding company a state-of-the-art set of business processes. SAI Consulting’s involvement was part of a large pro bono effort, sponsored by Professional Builder, that included a number of top consultants then serving the homebuilding industry.

I was the Process Architect for Fidelity Homes.

Sitting across the table were David Hunihan and Todd Menke, two young builders, eager to take their experience in homebuilding and pursue a National Housing Quality award. We had barely started, when David was pulled away by a telephone call. It was his wife, Lauren, asking if he was aware of what was going on in New York City.

As the events continued to unfold, in New York City, in Washington DC, in western Pennsylvania, we finally decided that it was impossible to focus on mapping workflow, and whatever we were doing did not seem all that important, anyway. We cancelled everything for the rest of the day, and, in our own ways, watched and tried to process what was happening.

Bill Lurz, then a senior editor at Professional Builder, joined us the following day. We finished the project two days later, and I drove back to my family in Ponte Vedra Beach through a tropical storm. On that day, the welcoming embraces had particular conviction.

The article was written and published in Professional Builder. The full story of Fidelity Homes was told in a six-part series on Escape from Averageness® in 2011, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack.

I still consider the events of 9/11 to be a matter of unfinished business for this country. Time has only increased my feelings about it. We were attacked, fifteen years ago, because of who we were, because of who we unapologetically remain. Our enemy sees it as unfinished business, as well.

Evil is the enemy of good; that evil has an ever-more-radical, and now secular, face. In the presence of that evil, we have failed to clearly state what war is; we have dismissed the understanding of war as the utter and complete destruction of an enemy.

It doesn’t matter what we think of issues like American Exceptionalism, our place in the world, the tradeoff between national security and the constitutional rights to privacy of US citizens, the threat of terrorist attacks on our own soil, the still-unaddressed murder of US diplomats and security personnel in Benghazi, the ramifications of decisions not to intervene in Iran and Syria, the emergence of ISIS, the question of what happens when Iran becomes a terrorist regime with nuclear weapons, or the question of how long we wait on North Korea to change its taunts into action.

The discussions on all of those matters miss the point.

The discussions miss the point, because they don’t address the root cause of the problem. The core problem is not the threat of future terrorist attacks or rogue regime nuclear attacks. The problem is the terrorists and their sponsors; the problem is rogue nuclear regimes and their enablers.

And, the solution is not attrition, or containment, or control, or minimization, or dismantlement of the threat, or mounting an international coalition against terror, or imposing sanctions, or providing more humanitarian aid, or granting political asylum, or creating deeper understanding, or negotiating peace, or peace, itself.

It is true that Christians are told to love their enemies. It is also true that love and forgiveness do not remove consequences, and that scripture is filled with instances when the children of God were instructed to destroy their enemies. And – yes – the One, True God, in His righteousness and omnipotence, may decide to impart His own justice to this situation.

However – absent divine intervention – we cannot afford the “problem of conjecture”, as Henry Kissinger described it. We have now assured ourselves that there will be a war; if not a nuclear war, then certainly a war over who will have nuclear weapons. Competitors that already have nuclear weapons no longer fear us; the ones that will obtain them will not fear us, either. We are now in a far more dangerous, more deadly situation than we were in the aftermath of 9/11.

“Fleury. Tell me what you whispered to Janet, in the briefing, to get her to stop crying about Fran, you know, before all this, before we even got airborne. What’d you say to her? You remember?”

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